There have been major advances in electrical equipment designed to be installed inside a patient's body within the past few years. We can cite, as non-limiting examples, medical devices implanted to compensate for failure of a natural organ, such as the heart, for example, devices that monitor certain physiological parameters, or even devices suitable to deliver a particular dose of a particular therapeutic substance at a given time and in a specific part of the body.
A recurrent problem for all these implanted medical devices resides in managing the power supply that allows them to operate in a lasting manner. Although some of these implanted medical devices can work on a battery due to their low energy consumption, the majority of implanted medical devices consume a great deal of energy, which necessitates an ongoing power supply, most often using a power source external to the patient.
Thus, such types of implanted medical devices are often connected to an external power supply device by means of a percutaneous electrical cable. Although this electrical connection means is simple to implement during the surgical procedure, and often used for implanting medical devices temporarily, it has many risks of infection at the percutaneous passage of the connection cable.
Now, if an infection of the percutaneous passage spreads along the connection cable to the corresponding implanted medical device, it may cause a malfunction or even total breakdown of the implanted medical device.
Consequently, when an infection is detected at the percutaneous passage for the connection cable, it is necessary to change the connection cable before the infection neutralizes the implanted medical device.
For implanted electrical devices whose interrupted operation would not be life-threatening for the patient, changing the connection cable can be done simply by disconnecting the infected cable and replacing it with a sterile cable, or even by replacing the entire device if replacement of the cable alone is not possible.
However, for some other implanted medical devices, this is not the case, and interrupting their power supply risks, if the device concerns a vital role in the patient's survival, causing severe discomfort or even death of the patient. This is the case, for example, for heart pumps such as implanted left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) for which interrupting operation for the several minutes required to replace the cable would be fatal to the patient, especially a patient with terminal heart failure. In this case, it is therefore not possible to stop the progression of the infection by changing the connection cable.
A goal of the present invention is to provide an electrical connection system to electrically connect a medical device designed to be positioned inside an animal's body with a power supply device intended to be positioned outside the animal's body that allows resolving the problems outlined above in connection with infections that could neutralize the medical device.
In particular, a goal of the present invention is to provide an electrical connection system that allows maintaining the power supply of the implanted medical device during the replacement of infected elements to stop the progression of the infection up to the medical device.
Another goal of the present invention is to provide assemblies made up of a medical device designed to be implanted in the body of an animal, such as a human, and for which the risks of malfunction or breakdown due to infections could be treated while reducing, or even eliminating, the risks for the patient.